Been having a blast on this. Sadly due to overwhelming player traffic, Icewatch is all but removed. Zaviel is currently my new home. Joined a great little guild called Old Gits Reunited, any guildless EG players are more than welcome!

Regarding performance, the game is very pretty at times but does indeed run like pants
Never actually maxes my card out despite fps dropping below 30 on the large rifts etc, seems to be no multicore cpu utilisation. Also been getting loads of lag and dc's. Hopefully something that will improve soon.

Sharzam wrote:
It might just be server load. When I was playing a few months ago I would get 70-90fps on max settings, and I have lower specs. So hopefully will improve over next few days or weeks.

2 GTX 570s in Sli
I5 2500k at 4.7ghz

I think server load is definitely an issue - I've noticed since F2P that, for example, NPCs in Tempest Bay sometimes take forever to actually appear on-screen and zone loading seems to have taken a huge hit too. And obviously more and more players running around will have a performance cost to it due to the additional rendering load, data going back and forth, etc etc.

On the NA region which I play in they've already added 2 new servers (Necromancer and Hailol) as there has been a MASSIVE influx of new players - a huge amount of which are returning players rather than just newbies. Not sure what the EU servers are like though, but I've heard that they temporarily made Icewatch trial-accounts only or something?

Give it a month for the initial surge to even off a bit and for them to get a better idea of their increased capacity and infrastructure needs and I'd imagine a lot of performance issues will ease off.

Plus there's going to be the usual issues you get with any significant patch (and 2.3 is massive in terms of what it brings to the table in a lot of ways) bringing its own wrinkles and technical issues to the table.

It seems like a small thing, but it actually creates a massive performance hit.

I prefer having little to no grass anyway, as it can obscure things like crafting nodes - plants, ore, wood, etc as well as those all-important shiny artifacts.

Been mulling whether or not to learn LUA so I can create some addons. I know Rift's API isn't particularly open, with lots of stuff annoying locked away, but there's also a lot of stuff which is possible which isn't currently catered for because the addon support for game isn't very huge (though this might change now that its gone f2p and player numbers are increasing).

In MMO terms, even the most amazing can pc seem to struggle to display stuff that looks like it's from 5 years ago. I think all of the MMOs i play have really uneven optimisation - yes even WoW and GW2.

Reacher wrote:
I tried this now it has become FTP. I'm a long term MMO player but I just didn't enjoy it. Having played GW2 a lot, Rift felt a bit stodgy in the combat.

The joy of rift is in the class system - being able to mix and match a huge amount of callings and find your own combinations and which skills in one calling will go well with skills in another. It has a lot more depth and intricacy, imo, than GW2.

I found some free time for a bit of Rift yesterday. Ending up grouping with a player who was in the same area as me. We had a chat and a laugh and worked through a few quest lines. I've really missed things like that from MMO's recently.

Level 38 now and just reached Moonshade Highlands. Been a bit of a completionist so far and not leaving a zone until I've got the quest achievement done, makes for slower leveling I guess but the 50k PA gems will always come in handy once I reach 50.

teamHAM wrote:
Ah hah. Just seen this. I decided to give this a bash as I'm not playing wow at the moment. Saw it went free to play with a cash shop and read some fairly positive reactions to the changes.

Just so happens I started on Gelidra.

Any EG related guild and/or mentoring goodness going on? I am a complete newcomer to the game and it looks pretty complex compared to the current WoW fare.

You can give me an add mate, struggling for gaming time these days but pop on from time to time.